Brave Shoots an Arrow into First Place at the Box Office

There aren’t many companies in Hollywood that can lay claim to 13 consecutive number one spot debuts for films, but Pixar can now do just that.

Brave, the latest from the Disney-owned Pixar, took the top spot at the box office this weekend with $66.7 million. Of all the Pixar films this was the one with the biggest question mark next to it if it could grab the top spot, and it did so without hesitation. It’s currently tracking ahead of Wall-E, so Brave is winning by rights, and not a fluke.

Coming in second was Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted with another $20.2 million. It’s currently quite a bit ahead of the second film in the series for the same number of days of release, so it’s looking like everyone was really in the mood for some animated fare this summer.

The third spot in the top five, however, is where we return to the depressing news for the summer of 2012 at the box office. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter opened with a very soft $16.5 million.

Fourth place went to Prometheus with another $10 million, which is another slide of 51.7% from last weekend which already had a 60.4% fall. This movie is not long for this world it would appear.

Wrapping up the top five was a tie between Snow White and the Huntsman and Rock of Ages with $8 million each. The real story here was Rock’s fall actually only represents a fall of 44.3%. As I’ve said before, anything less than a 50% drop in business in the second weekend is considered a pretty successful second weekend, it’s just too bad it’s first weekend wasn’t what was hoped for.

Next weekend sees a quartet of releases with three of them being comedies. Magic Mike, People Like Us, Ted and Madea’s Witness Protection. Oddly, Ted is the only film to hit the 3,000 screen location benchmark, all of the rest are coming in well under that. Don’t expect to see gigantic numbers out of any of these.

And where is our current whipping boy, Battleship? In 14th place with $495,000. It’s domestic gross now stands at $63.1 million … it was at $62 million last weekend. To be fair, it’s foreign take is at $235.6 million giving it a worldwide total of $298,766,000 off of a $209 million budget. Normal math would say, “Hey, profit!”, but this is Hollywood and I can tell you this thing is leaking red ink like a stuck pig. Remember that budgets do not include marketing, distribution, prints, venue revenue splits and that doesn’t even get into how much more of the money is lost in foreign markets. All told this movie is on the books for somewhere around $400 million with ease. Some of this will be made up for with home video sales, television rights and so on, but if this film ever makes all of its money back, I would be shocked.